It’s only been nine years since Tortoise released their last album, but it feels a lot longer. The quintet were closely associated with the Chicago post-rock scene of the late 1990s and early 2000s, and when that scene ran its course, they suddenly seemed unmoored from their original context and anchored to something in the past. On 2016’s The Catastrophist they sounded like a band out of time, an impression bolstered by the fact that the album has been commissioned by the City of Chicago to highlight the scene that had birthed the band nearly 20 years prior. But they kept the subject matter at arm’s length, which made the music sound slick and cursory.
It’s been nine years since Tortoise released their last album…
It’s only been nine years since Tortoise released their last album, but it feels a lot longer. The quintet were closely associated with the Chicago post-rock scene of the late 1990s and early 2000s, and when that scene ran its course, they suddenly seemed unmoored from their original context and anchored to something in the past. On 2016’s The Catastrophist they sounded like a band out of time, an impression bolstered by the fact that the album has been commissioned by the City of Chicago to highlight the scene that had birthed the band nearly 20 years prior. But they kept the subject matter at arm’s length, which made the music sound slick and cursory.
Now, in 2025, Tortoise have an all-new context. They are back in time, so to speak: their hometown has experienced a revival in its jazz and improvisational music scene, as a new generation of artists that includes Makaya McCraven, Angel Bat Dawid, Daniel Villareal, Macie Stewart and many others have brought a forceful new voice to venues around town. In some cases they’ve even performed and recorded with members of Tortoise, guitarist Jeff Parker in particular. At the heart of this community is International Anthem Recording Co., the label that has released albums by all of those artists mentioned. Founded in 2014, it has helped to coalesce a new market for exploratory music that has more overlap with indie rock and experimental beats than with the traditional jazz scene.
It elevates the band to the status of local legends
So it’s fitting that International Anthem is releasing Touch, Tortoise’s eighth studio album (in a partnership with the venerable Nonesuch Records). The association adds something hefty to this release, more so than if any other label had put it out. It elevates the band to the status of local legends, furthering strengthening their connection to Chicago despite the fact that three of its five members have moved west. The band are obviously invigorated by what’s happening in Chicago right now, but they act less like influential forebears and more like peers and contemporaries. Their new songs are lean, weird, wired, purposeful, as the band of multi-instrumentalists – Jeff Parker, Dan Bitney, Douglas McCombs, John Herndon and John McEntire – continue to dig deeper and deeper into what makes a groove groove.
As always, they take the instruments of rock’n’roll – a tight rhythm section, a twangy guitar, assorted keyboards and synths – and assemble them in new ways, drawing from a bewildering range of sources. There’s a lot of jazz exploration of course, but also avant-garde composition, improv spontaneity, krautrock linearity, noise, hip-hop beats and soundtrack ambience. Opener “Vexations” hangs ten on a deconstructed surf-rock guitar lick, recalling both The Ventures and Ennio Morricone, while the ominous closer “Night Gang” invokes the lumbering enormity of Jack Nitzsche’s “The Lonely Surfer”. It sounds like three AM in downtown Chicago, towering skyscrapers framing a cold night sky.
These songs are full to bursting with sounds and ideas
These songs are full to bursting with sounds and ideas, suggesting a kind of wide-eyed maximalism, as though nothing is off limits except silence. Yet, like the best Tortoise albums, Touch still sounds carefully edited and precisely shaped. There is always method to their madness. “Elka” opens with what sounds like a Chicago house beat, percolating just before the drop, but the drop never arrives. Instead, the sound is assimilated into a shapeshifting shuffle. “Axial Seamount” (named from an underwater volcano off the Oregon coast) lurches into life on a motorik beat, which the band accentuate with burbling guitar notes and keyboard chords that bubble up to the surface. When the tempo quickens halfway through, the song becomes even sleeker and more streamlined, cutting through the water like a retrofuturistic submarine.
As with a lot of music labeled “post-rock”, Tortoise might come across as a little too brainy, as though they’re simply adding up equations on a chalkboard. But there’s so much gee-wizardry and wonder in even the cleverest tracks on Touch, not to mention moments of surprising poignancy. With its loping bassline pushing the song along at a casual pace, “Promenade À Deux” manages the feat of sounding both cinematic and intimate, as though Tortoise are scoring a small, quiet moment in an otherwise grand epic, perhaps when a character feels the first glimmer of regret or hope. That combination of chugging rhythm and gentle synths pinpoints feelings so acute you can’t quite name them.
A band reaffirming the ideals that animated them in the first place
There is, of course, a boisterous quality to the album, in the blown-out drums on “Rated OG” and the dissonant bass chords that anchor “Works And Days” and what sounds like a distorted organ adding psychedelic flourishes to “Layered Presence”. Like a bunch of sugar-addled tots in a toy store, they seem to have a blast banging things together, and that sense of play can be endearing and even affecting. Touch reminds you how much fun Tortoise are, how seriously they take these musical ideas and how utterly unseriously they take themselves. For that reason, the album has the weight of a comeback. It’s not just a band getting back together after nearly a decade apart, but a band reaffirming the ideals that animated them in the first place.
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